That's a nuclear submarine reactor/generator/throttle control panel.

Meh, I get more junk snail mail than junk calls, and even though snail mail doesn't actually interrupt what I'm doing, its still pretty annoying because of the environmental cost and the cost of recycling, which is born by the council (and hence the council tax payer).

Yes, but in the US, at least, bulk mailing subsidizes ordinary first-class letters. It's annoying, but it's the postal equivalent of advertisements on the radio - the noise pays the bills for the signal. I have no idea if it works that way in the UK, though.

That Hacker Tourist is Neal Stephenson, so the article has the verbal density of a neutron star and is intensely fascinating. I read it a while ago, pretty good stuff.

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.

Has anyone got any good articles, documentaries, or personal experiences about what ordinary Internet use is like in the PRC? Does filtering or censorship show up as a brick wall "COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY CONTENT FORBIDDEN", or a passive "sorry, no such content found"? How often does it affect ordinary daily browsing? If ordinary browsers are aware of it, do they generally develop a seething resentment of it, or a shrug-and-live-with-it accpetance (or resignation) like some western employees whose workplaces filter access? I'd be interested to read something objective about what the filter actually is, what it does, and how the Chinese generally feel about it.